It’s not necessarily cheap or convenient, but building a physical collection of Blu-Rays (or DVDs if quality isn’t priority) is something that can’t be taken away.
Add on a compatible Blu-Ray drive to your computer and you can even rip the digital files yourself. It’s taken me a few years, but now I never have to worry if my favorite movie is available when I want to show a friend. It also makes them easy to loan.
You don’t need a new system to do this and in fact can do it yourself. The issue comes in with signing up for new accounts, etc. Unfortunately there’s all sorts of different domains that emails can come from even with a single provider.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
If you want to learn Ubuntu, download Ubuntu.
If you want to learn Arch, download Arch.
If you want to learn Linux, download Slackware.
Here’s an actual video of the event: https://youtu.be/owOqFFNfzew
I once went to a FourLoko sponsored block party that you could attend for free. They were also handing out free FourLoko to all attendants. I chose not to have any, but that was one of the most insane crowds I have ever been in.
I don’t know of the community is still going with the release of Apple Silicon, but you used to be able to with the Hackintosh project. I can’t imagine you still can with the switch to ARM.
I hate that often Microsoft Teams is the only piece of software I can get to work for sharing a screen with the layman. Many cross-platform user-friendly options don’t work reliably on Linux, but by some weird twist of fate, I get it to work more often than anything else.
Yes, for an IT person’s own solution, you’d just use a VPN or something, but I’m rarely working with people that are technical enough for this.